Baltimore City Paper

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Summer is the season of crabs, of ice cream, of firing up the grill, of deliciously tender barbecue full of flavor that explodes in your mouth and sends meat juices dripping down your hands. And now, the height of summer, seems like the perfect time to celebrate barbecue and its smoky, tender variations....

In April, Devin Allen walked the streets of Baltimore with protesters mourning the loss of Freddie Gray and speaking out against police brutality, and posted his stark, observational photos to his Instagram. Allen delivered honest portrayals of the Baltimore Uprising in real time and eventually...

Barbecue. The very name of this food channels ferocity, savagery, even—say it with me—barbarism. Barbecue, after all, is what happens when you combine smoke, heat, and meat. Fattier the better, spicy red pepper-infused sauce licked lusciously from the fingers and bringing a flush to the face, all...

Barbecue—the low-and-slow method of cooking meat until it easily comes apart at the touch—is a culinary point of pride for the American South. If you're looking to eat your way into a food coma with tender Carolina-style pulled pork, check out City Paper's meat bracket (page 18) for local barbecue...

Mobtown Beat

Cognitive dissonance is described as the very human ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind, and Chrys Kefalas, chief speechwriter for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and a potential Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, goes one better: He makes the opposing concepts...

On the afternoon of July 6, just two days before Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, the department called a press conference to announce rare good news: arrests in three murders and six shootings.

Anthony Batts’ departure reminds us that City Hall appears to have had a revolving door installed around 2011; new hires at city agencies typically last around two years and are gone before we learn their names.

Another violent weekend capped another week in which the murder pace exceeded one per day. This occurred because a death from last month was ruled a homicide. There were also 16 nonfatal shootings reported, plus at least one other stabbing. Police made arrests for attempted murder and gun crimes...

Eats & Drinks

The thing about living gluten free, whether by choice or by medical necessity, is that everyone who is not living gluten free always has lots of helpful suggestions. Suggestions about where and what to eat that don't involve the usual pitfalls of GF life: bread, pasta, baked goods. And don't get...More

When Park Cafe & Coffee Bar, located in a carriage house in Bolton Hill, opened back in February, the co-owners David Hart and Joseph Costa told The Sun that the inspiration for their first restaurant venture came from an extended trip to Europe the two had taken together. "Instead of buying Porsches,...

I recently heard about cauliflower tortillas, and knew I had to try them. Three perfect batches later, I can attest, this recipe is phenomenal. Whether you're into eating paleo or primal, or you are just looking for a way to get more fiber and vegetables into your diet, these tortillas are a must-try.

Music

Even as David Bowie publicly played with his own sexual identity in the early '70s, the idea of a truly gay rock star was too much for one record executive. Handed a single about the men who populate leather bars from a band named Smokey, the exec remarked: "We can't put this out, it's a fucking...

"Are you OK with heights?" Alexandra Brandon mindfully asks me before we step out of her third-floor Mount Vernon apartment window, up a fire escape, and onto to the roof. We're here to discuss her noise project TRNSGNDR/VHS, whose recent EP, "Condominium," full of slithering tonal glitches and...

“Welcome to reality,” sings Grimes on her electro-soar of a single about coming back from touring or falling in or out of love or whatever, although she spells it ‘REALiTi,’ because Grimes. It is the best song of the year as far as I’m concerned.

Back in 1988, Booda Monk was a “stalker”—one of many dancers on the floor engaged in a type of dance called stalking in which dancers followed each other from one side of the club to the other, adding unique moves along the way. Monk’s club was Centre and Highland’s locally famed Club Fantasy where...

It’s been years since Artscape was able to pull in headliners like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. After recent top billers like Matisyahu and Brian McKnight, it’ll be great to see a legend like George Clinton up on the Main Stage, even if the Parliament-Funkadelic founder, who turns 74 later...

Screens

There are many ambitious set pieces in this Soviet-Cuban communist-humanist epic and you've probably heard about a few of them, such as the epic single take in which the camera whirls all around a party full of American tourists at a Cuban hotel that starts on the roof and follows partying men...More

Like "The Goonies" or Claude McKay's "Home To Harlem," Sean Baker's "Tangerine" is pretty much a frenzied remix of "The Odyssey." Here, a journey-back-to-a-partner tale is bent into a picaresque sprint through Los Angeles with fresh-outta-jail trans woman sex worker Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez)...

Spoiler alert: There is absolutely no way to talk about "Sense8" in all its queer glory without disclosing major spoilers. And that's largely because no one has any idea WTF is going on with this Netflix original for the first half of the season. "Sense8"—from trans filmmaker Lana Wachowski and...

Chris Pratt might want men to be objectified as much as women but Channing Tatum is the only one putting praxis behind philosophy and building a franchise in service to the female gaze. "Magic Mike XXL" fulfills its title’s promise by elevating the 2012 original’s strippers from broken and recession-weary...

Visual Art

When a Fabergé egg with testicles and satellite attachments emerges from a portal in the middle of the minimalist-design room we've found ourselves immersed in, we're taken a bit off guard. We continue to pan around the perimeter of the sleek, round room, which is lined by small surveillance cameras,...

Something is afoul in each of Emily Campbell's massive drawings. In her show "Imaginary Islands" with the ICA Baltimore at Space Camp (formerly the D Center), crowded compositions show people ritualistically fucking, hanging each other, and carving animal carcasses. Prostitutes hang by rope from...

Existing somewhere between the readymades of Duchamp and Rauschenberg’s combines and collages, activist Duane “Shorty” Davis uses new and discarded toilets, along with tape, super glue, newspaper, photos, and other found paper scraps to construct caustic protest art. One of his toilets, ‘America’s...

I’ve come to witness any change at all in my neighborhood with a sense of trepidation and skepticism bordering on paranoia. As a resident of what my friends and I refer to as “The Station North Arts and Gentrification District,” no news is usually good news. So I was, at first, unhappy to see that...

At last year’s Alternative Art Fair during Artscape, Margo Benson Malter of artists collective Open Space got to yell at a cop for riding his bike around the Charles Street parking garage. She says it was “cool to boss cops around, a cool opportunity.” And Nick Peelor had an hour-and-a-half-long...

We have no idea who will win the 10th annual Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize this year. We’re even hesitant to claim any particular favorites; the three out-of-town judges did an OK job in both selecting a diverse group of artists whose work appeals on many different levels, and ensuring...

Like a pair of billboards in a foggy mist, a two-tiered wooden structure holds up two oil paintings on wood panels, one painted in washes of juicy magentas and crimsons and the other bleached out in white. We can just barely make out the texture of the white panel, which mimics the linear pattern...

Books

There is something both comforting and terrifying in the idea that identity can be fluid, that our senses of self don't have to be rigidly defined. The word itself flows like water and implies something that changes or refreshes; it also feels uncertain, as if it lacks structure. But Maggie Nelson's...

Without giving it much thought, most Orioles fans would tell you Jim Palmer is the best pitcher in franchise history. They might not know about the right shoulder injury in 1968 that nearly ended his career—and the story behind how he healed it.

Stage

Ned Worley is shooting his presidential campaign ad. Jacket slung over his shoulder, he steps forward and pontificates about his widowed, lower-middle-class, Portuguese immigrant mother (his campaign manager insists he call her "mamá," despite Ned's protests), his triumph over cancer, and how he...